The Wood Street encampment in Oakland, once northern California’s biggest, has been shut down, with officials on Wednesday removing the last handful of residents who remained as the city’s plan for a phased eviction comes to an end.
Only months ago, the encampment spanned several city blocks under the off-ramp of the 880 interstate in West Oakland. In April, the city started a protracted eviction that swept through and scattered those who were living there. Up until last week, a dozen or so residents remained at the camp in what they called “the Commons”: the heart of a thriving community of outcasts. They saw themselves participating in a radical experiment in how to rethink helping the unhoused.
“I came here to kill myself, but these people beside me saved my life,” said LaMonté Ford, 50, at a news conference held by the remaining residents on 1 May. “This space gave me a new lease on life.”
Ford had lived in Wood Street for the past six years, but his home was bulldozed to the ground on 1 May. He moved into an RV, but the displacement has upended his life, he said: “It’s like a tornado, it’s like my world has just been ripped off the ground, thrown in the air and exploded into a thousand pieces.”
Oakland is experiencing its worst housing and homelessness crisis ever. According to the latest point-in-time survey, conducted in 2022, there are more than 5,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city – up 25% since 2019 and a staggering 131% since 2015. Like Ford, 43% of unhoused people in Alameda county, where Oakland is located, are Black, even though Black residents make up only 10% of the general population.
Amid this crisis, and the Mad Max dystopia of the greater Wood Street area, the Commons was a little refuge, its residents said. Yes, the whole area around Wood Street had been used as an unofficial city dump by everyone from construction contractors, auto body shops, and car thieves, but the Commons kitchen was available 24 hours a day and stocked with free food donated by community members, NGOs and church groups. It had solar panels hooked up to a battery, as well as a generator to keep the fridge running and the hot beverages flowing. There was a large pizza oven and a living room with couches under a large canopy.
Before the eviction, the camp had a free store, a health clinic, a stage for open mic performances and slam poetry.
The three-acre parcel of land the camp was located on is owned by the city, who plan to develop it into 170 units of affordable housing by 2027 or 2028.
Details on how affordable the 170 units will be are scarce. Half the units will be for rent, the other half will be for sale, according to a fact sheet shared by the city. Officials say they plan to make the housing affordable to households ranging from extremely low income to moderate income. At least 13 units will be earmarked for homeless households, six units for formerly homeless veterans and seven for youth exiting the foster care system who are at high risk of becoming homeless, according to the sheet.
Oakland is required by the state of California to build more than 26,000 units of housing by 2031. Of those, 40% must be built for low- and very low-income households.
Meanwhile, the median price of a home in the city in 2022 was just shy of $1m.
California law requires local authorities to provide housing assistance to homeless individuals and the state has provided the city of Oakland with $4.7m explicitly to rehouse residents of the Wood Street encampment.
The Oakland spokesperson, Jean Walsh, said outreach to the residents began more than a year ago. Outreach workers know people by name and are working to help residents find their next shelter, she said.
The city is encouraging people to move a couple of blocks up Wood Street to a site where they have built about 100 tiny homes, or “community cabins”, where Wood Street residents can stay up to six months. They have also set up a “safe RV parking” site in East Oakland. Both sites have job placement assistance, meals, help with mental health and other services and programs.
Fifty-seven encampment residents out of about 70 have accepted shelter services, according to Walsh.
But not all residents are convinced. “It looks like some garden sheds put on a parking lot. And that’s their solution – to keep you there until you jump through enough hoops and climb underneath enough things to get your reward to be given the housing,” said Masoud Saberi, a 46-year-old resident who is known as Moose.
In the days before the final eviction, residents had tried to stay in their shelters in the hopes they wouldn’t get bulldozed. Speaking to the Guardian through a 10ft fence because the city was restricting journalists’ access to 15-minute increments, Moose explained why he wasn’t just picking up and moving: “I believed in what we were doing here. I actually felt like I was an effective contributor to a community, to a group of people who otherwise never would have had their needs properly assessed or properly addressed. They probably would have been floating around the system for years.”
Moose was interrupted by someone warning his shelter may be demolished next. He darted across the encampment back to his two-story home, built by hand out of a prefab metal shed on a foundation of old tires, with several extensions made up of pallets, tarpaulins and various construction materials that had been dumped on Wood Street over the years.
By the time the Guardian negotiated permission to enter the site, Moose stood in his front yard staring mournfully at the handful of city sanitation workers in hazmat suits clearing out the debris, garbage and remnants of the encampment.
The city says it has removed more than 700 tonnes of trash and debris from the parcel since the eviction began. “There’s this idea that we come in with bulldozers and clear everyone out. It’s been a very slow, thoughtful, methodical process,” said Walsh.
Oakland has been criticized for its management of the homelessness crisis. An audit last year blasted the city for spending $12.6m in mostly unbudgeted costs to manage encampments over two years. The audit also found the city failed to “collect, track and analyze information about individuals’ success exiting services and how long they remain in permanent housing”. Such tracking is essential to understand if interventions work or not.
Requests for up-to-date information on how many people exit the cabins to permanent housing versus back on to the streets were sent to Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, which runs the cabin program; the city’s health and human services program planner; and to the tiny home contractor. None have answered.
Oakland’s newly elected mayor, Sheng Thao, who herself has spent months homeless and sleeping in her car, did not respond to a request for comment.
Staff for Carroll Fife, the city council member for district 3, where the encampment was located, said she was unavailable to comment.
In the final days of the encampment, some residents were moving to the RV site, some to the cabins, some hired a forklift and transported several of their makeshift houses out of the encampment and over to the north end of Wood Street. They hoped they wouldn’t be immediately evicted from there too.
When asked what his plan was, Moose choked back tears and said he wanted to “find out where I’m needed and where I can help”. What he’ll miss most, he said, is just “being accepted”.
Ford stood in front of his RV and pointed to a potted redwood tree he’s taking with him on the road. He collected some soil from the grounds of Wood Street and added it to the pot: “This is my land. This is all I have left.”
